NEW YORK, NY.- Frederico Sève Gallery present GEGO: Prints & Drawings 1963-1991, an exhibition featuring thirteen prints and drawings that were completed by the German born, Venezuelan artist, Gego (Gertrud Goldschmidt, 1912-1994), from 1963 to 1991, along with a book of lithographs dating back to 1966. The show is on display from May 25 – July 7, 2011.

The prints, drawings and book document a history of Gego’s involvement with prominent printmaking workshops in North America including Iowa State University; Pratt Institute, New York; and Tamarind Lithography Workshop, Los Angeles. GEGO: Prints & Drawings 1963-1991 sheds light on how the artist’s graphic works bridge her early sculptures with her breakthrough “drawings without paper”, which reflects space as its own form.

Gego’s influence is undeniable, although often overlooked by historical surveys. She is noted for her use of line as the subject itself, which resonates throughout her entire oeuvre. In a 2006 catalogue essay for Between Transparency and the Invisible, exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, art curator and critic Robert Storr writes, “The novelty of her idea of drawing without paper cannot be overstated…while seeming at first glance to have removed only paper from the process of drawing, she also removed what in the context of gesturalism has been called the mind of the hand, thereby eliminating the gestural drawing’s implicit author and subject…the implications of which extend beyond sculpture per se into the realms of nature and science.”

In June 2002, Frederico Sève Gallery, then known as latincollector, became one the first galleries to display Gego’s works in the United States, in an exhibition in conjunction with Gego Foundation. Prior to that time, Gego’s only other solo show in the city was in 1971. “I first became interested in Gego in 1999, while my wife and I had been spending a lot of time in Venezuela,” recalls Frederico Sève, founder of Frederico Sève Gallery. “I fell in love with the mystery of one of her ‘drawings without paper’ and instinctually felt that she was one of the most undervalued and underexposed Latin American artists at that time.”

Gego’s most recent solo exhibition in New York City was displayed in 2007 at The Drawing Center. Of that show, The New York Times writer Holland Cotter reviewed, “I first encountered her a decade ago in the eye-opening survey ‘Re-Aligning Vision: Alternative Currents in South American Drawing’...Even in that competitively eclectic show, her netlike, freehand ink drawings stood out. They were plain and complicated in ways nothing else was.”

Gego was born in Germany in 1912 and received her degree in architecture and engineering in 1938 from Stuttgart Technical School in Germany. She fled to Caracas, Venezuela, where she spent the majority of her career until her death in 1994.

She has been likened to early postmodernists Sol Lewitt and Yayoi Kusama, and to Latin American modernists Jesús Rafael Soto, Carlos Crus Diaz, Lygia Clark and Helio Oiticica. Her influence of kinetic paradigms, lightness, transmutability and information traversing space in its various forms can be seen in the works of contemporary artists such as Elias Crespin, Russel Crotty and Pepe Lopez.

Solo exhibitions of the artist have been displayed institutions including the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Drawing Center in New York City’ the Sicardi Gallery in Houston; Sala Mendoza in Caracas; Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona; Museo de Arte Moderno Jesus Soto in Bolivia; Museo de Barquisimeto; Museo Rufino Tamayo in Mexico City; and Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey, amongst others.

This is Frederico Sève Gallery’s second solo showing of Gego’s work.